Leonardo's Notebooks

Leonardo’s Notebooks is a biography of the genius in his own words, connecting moments of his life to artistic accomplishments through his writings, drawings, and intimate thoughts.

Leonardo da Vinci — artist, inventor, and prototypical Renaissance man — is a perennial source of fascination. His astonishing intellect and boundless curiosity about both the natural and man-made world influenced his numerous works of art, theories, and sentiments — all of which were kept in his voluminous notebooks.

This book is a collection of da Vinci’s intricately detailed artistic and intellectual pursuits, and highlights the classic pieces of art he produced in connection with his writings. Leonardo’s Notebooks provides a fascinating look into da Vinci’s most private world, and sorts his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, inventions and so much more. Exploring this image-filled book is as close to reading da Vinci’s diaries as we can get.

Organized and curated by art historian H. Anna Suh, she provides fascinating commentary and insight into the material, making Leonardo’s Notebooks an exquisite single-volume compendium celebrating his enduring brilliance.